The attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma have asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional Colorado’s law legalizing marijuana. The lawsuit states that, “The Constitution and the federal anti-drug laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of state and local pro-drug policies and licensed-distribution schemes throughout the country which conflict with federal laws.”

Federal law is a mess.

Many conservatives have criticized Nebraska and Oklahoma for being “fair-weather federalists” because their claims hinge, in part, on Gonzales v. Raich, a 2005 Supreme Court decision, upholding the broad reach of Congress’s power to regulate commerce.

Conservatives’ ire instead should be directed at the Obama administration’s decision to suspend enforcement of the federal law prohibiting marijuana—a decision so warping the rule of law that the complaining states’ reliance on Raich is justified and necessary. . . .

States cannot be required to enforce federal law. But as the Supreme Court held in Arizona v. United States (2012), when the federal government doesn’t enforce its own laws, states still “may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.” Colorado’s decision to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana undermines the Controlled Substances Act, giving a major boost to all segments of that business. Indeed, in an interview this month Colorado’s attorney general, John Suthers, acknowledged that his state is “becoming a major exporter of marijuana.”

American has lost the plot:

A 45-year-old man was sentenced Tuesday to nine years in prison, after nearly 400 pounds of marijuana was found in his home. Scott Bradley Cunningham, formerly of Inver Grove Heights, was charged, along with three other people, for possession of the drugs with the intent to distribute.

It”s about the lobby:

Former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) is the new CEO of a marijuana company that produces cannabis-infused products for both recreational and medical use, the company announced Tuesday.

The United States has a broken drugs policy.

Meanwhile… Let’s get bombed in go-ahead North Korea!

Outside of the United States, Uruguaybecame the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana in 2013. The Netherlands allows citizens to keep and cultivate some marijuana, and police let coffee shops sell marijuana as long as they don’t sell to minors or break other major rules. Spain also permits marijuana clubs where people can use the drug, although the drug is officially illegal to sell. And according to multiple reports from experts, visitors, and defectors, North Korea either has no law restricting marijuana or the law goes effectively unenforced.

IT’S at least an interesting entry for that accolade at least, the worst drug smugglers in the world.

So, two Brits decide to try their luck smuggling a tonne and a half of hashish from Morocco into the Algarve. Sounds like a plan: Morocco’s not that far away, the Rif and such places are hotbeds of cannabis production (they’re not just the right sort of climate, they’re also pretty lawless even today). As such the drug is cheap as chips there.

THIS is rather fun. The FBI, over in the US, is one of the most staid and white bread organisations in the world. They’re cops, of a sort, yes, but the internal culture at the place is still pretty much 50’s America. Flag, Mom and apple pie. And one of the parts of that is that pot smoking is absolutely verboeten.

Yeah, we all know, half the damn country smokes it at some time or another and no one comes to any great harm. But then again the FBI is one of the organisations that has to try and track down the drug dealers so perhaps the policy isn’t entirely stupid. The law is, but given the existence of the law the FBI might not be. But even here they’ve had to relax a little bit: you can apply for a job at the FBI if you have ever smoked pot (something they wouldn’t allow if you had ever robbed a bank) but not if you’ve smoked it in the past three years.

WELCOME to Newport, South Wales, You’ll never bother to leave. There’s free marijuana.

Council officials in Newport have yet to speak to the tourism division in their investigation into how cannabis came to feature in the town’s flower pots brightening up the city centre.

Local shopkeeper Dean Beddis, spotted the weed among the petunias:

“I had never seen cannabis growing in the wild before so it was crazy to see it. It’s actually rather a beautiful plant and stood out wonderfully. But they have gone now. I don’t know who took them. Either the council spotted them or some young type has spotted them and put them in his garden.”

The study looked at more than 4,600 people, 12 percent of whom said they were current marijuana users and 42 percent of whom said they had used in the past. Previous research had shown that marijuana users had a lower prevalence for diabetes and obesity, but this was the first study where scientists tried to determine if there was a link between insulin and glucose levels and marijuana usage, Yahoo Shine reported…

The study concludes: “with the recent trends in legalization of marijuana in the United States, it is likely that physicians will increasingly encounter patients who use marijuana and should therefore be aware of the effects it can have on common disease processes, such as diabetes mellitus. We found that current marijuana use is associated with lower levels of fasting insulin, lower HOMA-IR and smaller waist circumference.”

Some research finds that highly religious people are less likely to take drugs, but more likely to be obese — perhaps because they’re substituting one compulsive behavior (overeating) for the other (smoking marijuana). So, some of the obese people in the national surveys may be religious folk, who might otherwise be heavy marijuana smokers, but are eating too much instead. That could make it look like marijuana is slimming.Also consider that one of the most popular uses of medical marijuana is to stimulate appetite in people with cancer, AIDS or other diseases. Such patients are significantly less likely to be obese than the general population — so in this case, weight loss would precede or prompt the marijuana smoking.

Is smoking weed a compulsive behaviour?

Dr. Stuart Weiss, a professor and endocrinologist at the NYU School Of Medicine said, “We’d have to assume that there’s some compound that is involved with this marijuana smoke that causes an improvement in metabolism.”

New research from the University of California, Irvine — detailed in the March issue of Cell Metabolism — found that certain brain chemicals with characteristics similar to marijuana might play a key factor in helping you shed pounds without any exercise. A dream come true? Here’s a brief look at the promising discovery…

It’s an endocannabinoid compound called 2-AG. Endocannabinoids, as the name might suggest, share a similar molecular structure to the active ingredients in cannabis. Typically, high levels of 2-AG are found in the brains of mammals, and previous studies suggested that these compounds may make the body crave fat. Scientists think endocannabinoids play a key role in regulating the body’s metabolism, or the energy it makes from food.

MARIJUANA has gone mainstream. We’ve yet to see weed adverts on the side of F1 vehicles, as we have for cigarettes and booze, but NASCAR fans heading to the 2013 Brickyard 400 races at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will get to see a TV advert hailing cannabis.

CHECK out this 1960s Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs Identification Kit. Created not by cool art students looking to id the good stuff, but by Winston Products for Education. This was used in schools to teach students about drugs and their many dangers. How many children go their first look at these drugs in class? “So,” they nodded. “That’s whar the blueys do…”

A nameless cannabis delivery guy delivers his much needed medication to stressed-out New Yorkers in this character-driven web series. High Maintenance was created by husband and wife team Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. They produce the series with their BFF Russell Gregory as Janky Clown Productions.

A study claiming that pot use in youth has long-term cognitive effects is being challenged. The originalstudy, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that smoking marijuana as a teenager may be associated with IQ declines by middle age. The new study, published in the same journal on Monday (January 14), said that IQ declines were likely a product of socioeconomic status, Nature reported.

“Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature,” Ole Røgeberg, the sole author of the new study and an economist at The Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo, wrote in the paper.

As states increasingly adopt laws allowing medical marijuana, fewer teens see occasional marijuana use as harmful, the largest national survey of youth drug use has found. Nearly 80% of high school seniors don’t consider occasional marijuana use harmful — the highest rate since 1983 — and one in 15 smoke nearly every day, according to the annual survey of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders made public Wednesday.

More than one in five high school seniors said they smoked marijuana in the month before the survey, and 36% smoked marijuana during the previous year, according to Monitoring the Future survey of 45,449 students from 395 public and private schools. After four straight years of increasing marijuana use among teens, annual use among 10th and 12th graders stabilized and use by eighth graders declined slightly since 2010.

YAYYY! It is now legal to smoke (eat and drink ) marijuana in Washington State. It’s not legal to buy it:

Today, for the first time in 89 years (Washington lawmakers initially outlawed cannabis in 1923, 14 years ahead of the enactment of federal prohibition.), an adult may possess up to one ounce cannabis (and/or up to 16 ounces of marijuana-infused product in solid form, and 72 ounces of marijuana-infused product in liquid form) for their own personal use in private — and they may do without being in violation of state law.

BACK in 1994, Barack Obama was keen to rethink the failing war on drugs.

During his first term the key member of the Choom Gang did nothing. And then on the day of his re-election to a second and final term – the time when legacies are written – Colorado passed Amendment 64 to legalise marijuana for recreational use.

MARIJUANA is now legal on Colorado. How does the market work? Tony Dokoupil explains:

After Eric Holder and the Obama administration suggested that they weren’t going to crack down on medical marijuana, everybody and their brother grabbed a trash bag full of weed out of their backyard and were like, ‘All right, medical marijuana here for sale!’ … Then Colorado was really interesting … because there’s a core of young, educated, politically connected and well-financed guys who said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t have former black market drug dealers and bikini girls as the face of our industry, because the community’s not going to accept it.

“So they partnered with law enforcement. They partnered with state legislators. They hired incredibly high-level political consultants and lobbyists who have worked nationally. And they are the inside force that led to the creation of Colorado’s regulated medical marijuana industry, which is unlike any in the country and which will be the basis for the legalized, regulated market. And so in response to the craziness that we saw in 2009 … a movement toward controlled, regulated, not-in-your-face, nonconfrontational pot culture has begun.”

VIDA Golac, 18, of Golden Gate Estates, says the marijuana in her vagina is not hers.

Naples police officers pulled over the car Golac was riding in with two friends. A search produced a stash of marijuana in the back of the car near, next to Gloac. She said the weed wasn’t hers. She said it belonged to her two other passengers. They denied it and left.

FACE of the day: Some of Rocque’s pot-stained prints are being sold for $2,500 each. A show featuring the work opened last week at a small alternative gallery in the stylish Ipanema neighbourhood. It takes him a week to complete a single print blowing about five joints’ worth of smoke onto a paper daily. Bill Clinton missed his calling…

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Brazilian artist Fernando de la Rocque stands in front of some of their pieces of art at the La Cucharacha, a small alternative gallery in the stylish, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Monday Aug. 20, 2012. Some of Rocque's pot-stained prints are being sold for $2,500 each. It takes him a week to complete a single print blowing about five joints' worth of smoke onto a paper daily. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

MARIJUANA is not legal. Still. Face of the Day features Matt Galanti, 17, of Bothell, Washington, smoking marijuana from a glass bong at the opening day of the pro-marijuana rally Seattle Hempfest. To his side are Zach Casselman, 18, of Bothell, and Clay Graeber, 20. The three-day event comes as citizens in Washington state prepare to vote on an initiative that would legalize and tax the sale of up to an ounce of cannabis at state-licensed stores.

“Here’s what we know: Prohibition has not worked,” told supporters who lazed in the grass a cloud of cannabis haze. It’s fueled criminal violence. Right now in this city, people are murdering each other over pot…. It’s time to stop. It’s time to tax it, regulate it, legalize it.”

So. Will every stoner and medical marijuana user vote for Initiative 502? There will be rules:

The proposed law limits possession of smokable marijuana to one ounce. It has a blood-THC standard for driving a car, and no such standard exists now. It has heavy taxes. It doesn’t allow private growing of marijuana plants except by medical patients.

PLANS are afoot for Uruguay to control marijuana. President Jose Mujica tells Colombia’s RCN radio that the government will take over the country’s buoyant marijuana markets. This will enable it to do down the criminals and monitor usage.

Uruguay – where possession of small amounts of weed is not a criminal offence – would become the world’s first nation to sell marijuana directly to the consumer.

ZOMBIE CANNIBALS are about to run legal in Barack Obama’s Chicago. The city has voted to decriminalise minor marijuana possession. Possessing cannabis is illegal. Now, however, owner will get a fine. Chicago joins Seattle, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is approaching sense.

We’re still not there yet, though. The decision to fine and by how much will be left to the Chicago police service. Get caught holding less than 15g of weed and expect a fine ranging from $250 to $500.

The move was brought by Barack Obama’s old Chief of Staff mayor Rahm Emanuel. He was aided by Chicago police superintendent, Gary McCarthy, who said most of the 20,000 yearly arrests of marijuana possession create criminal cases that are dropped. This new way frees up police time to chase actual criminals and count all that money from fines, an estimated $7m.

So. As Chicago finds a legal way to tax illegal marijuana, we look at President Obama. Did he inhale?